They chatted politics for a while.

Were there gay people in the ancient world, or is gayness a uniquely modern category?

The southern front struck me as cold, bald, and inornate. I cannot but think that, in the absence of stone balustrades, the distinctive character of the terraces might have been just as well preserved by formally clipped yews, or, at all events, if a hedge of sweetbrier, or barberries, or privet had been substituted for the rude railing in front of the meadow. Neither would the slopes have looked worse had they been diversified here and there by a flowering shrub, or a straggling cotoneaster, or a small bed of rhododendra.

She had the brilliant inventor and craftsman Daedalus construct her an artificial cow, in which she hid and induced the bull to couple with her …